Noah Feldman Loves Islamic Supremacism, Hates Judaism

Orthodox Jews likely remember Noah Feldman from his deceptive New York Times Magazine article written in a snit after he claimed that he and his girlfriend were edited out of his school's reunion photo. The assertion turned out to be false but this not stop Noah Feldman from writing a hatefilled tirade of an article which falsely claimed that Jewish doctors could not treat non-Jews and tried to link Yigal Amir to his old Yeshiva. While the piece read like something that might have been written by David Duke on a bad day, the New York Times not only printed it but ignored the OU's demand for a retraction after the Jewish Week demonstrated Noah Feldman's blatant deceptiveness.

But hating Jews is just a companion for Noah Feldman's love of Islam. Not only did Noah Feldman major in Islamic Thought but in his new career at the New York Times Noah Feldman has become a chief apologist for Islam and for promoting the rise of Muslim tyranny in the Middle East and Europe too.

Martin Kramer describes Noah Feldman's agenda to promote Islamic supremacism this way;

The Esposito/Feldman idea goes like this: Islamists are really no worry at all. In fact, they are actually the best hope for democracy in the Middle East. Leading Islamist thinkers want democracy, and if Islamist parties were allowed to take power—which they certainly would do in free elections—it would be an improvement over the situation today. Even if Islamists declared "Islamic" states on assuming power, these regimes would probably be more or less democratic, provided you don't insist on a narrow, culture-bound definition of democracy. The United States is making a big mistake by allying itself with autocratic rulers in the region, and it's betraying its values too. It should encourage inevitable change in the Islamists' favor, which is really in the U.S. interest.

Despite his blatant falsifications, Noah Feldman continues on meanwhile as Contributing Editor for the New York Times and his latest article is an attempt to promote the ascension of Islamic law. There are a lot of words in the mix like "Nuance" and "Long legal tradition" and "Empowerment" but what it comes down to, is that we should welcome the imposition and rise of Sharia.

In rapturous tones Noah Feldman discusses how much better women had it under Sharia than under Islamic common law and how tolerant and liberal its punishments were. You would almost imagine that you're reading Jonathan Swift's essay on cooking Irish babies except Noah Feldman isn't penning political satire. He really means it.

In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation.

By the time Noah Feldman is talking about the election triumphs of the Islamists, he's almost bouncing up and down in his chair for glee.

Islamist political parties, like those associated with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, make the adoption of Shariah the most prominent plank in their political platforms. And the message resonates. Wherever Islamists have been allowed to run for office in Arabic-speaking countries, they have tended to win almost as many seats as the governments have let them contest. The Islamist movement in its various incarnations — from moderate to radical — is easily the fastest growing and most vital in the Muslim world; the return to Shariah is its calling card.

Yes and as we've seen the human results of Shariah and Islamic law from Iraq to Afghanistan to Somalia has led mobs of Muslims to rise up and chase them out of power. Iran and Gaza may well be next. It would almost seem as if even devoted Muslims don't find the liberal and humane practice of beheading people for watching soccer matches or throwing acid in women's faces to be quite as "vital" and "humane" as he does. Maybe it's their high standard of proof.

How is it that what so many Westerners see as the most unappealing and premodern aspect of Islam is, to many Muslims, the vibrant, attractive core of a global movement of Islamic revival? The explanation surely must go beyond the oversimplified assumption that Muslims want to use Shariah to reverse feminism and control women — especially since large numbers of women support the Islamists in general and the ideal of Shariah in particular.

Perhaps it's what Westerners value law derived from democratic legal principles, rather than from a blind Mullah sitting around a table. And perhaps the sight of teenage boys whipped to death, a teenage girl hung because she talked back to a judge, whipped beaten bloody and pulled off the street for wearing excessively colorful clothing only to be raped in the police station and then turned into prostitutes under Islamic law's Temporary Marriage... repulses them.

Of course large numbers of women support the Islamists. Women who don't tend to flee the country or wind up beaten or in prison or shot outright.

Some rules associated with Shariah are undoubtedly old-fashioned and harsh. Men and women are treated unequally, for example, by making it hard for women to initiate divorce without forfeiting alimony. The prohibition on sodomy, though historically often unenforced, makes recognition of same-sex relationships difficult to contemplate.

Yes, since recognition of those relationships tends to end in a hanging. As is currently the case in Iran and plenty of the Muslim world.

And mandating capital punishment for apostasy is not on the agenda of most elected Islamists.

Note Noah Feldman's slimy way of dodging the fact that the death penalty for apostasy is Islamic law. He can't actually deny it, so he tries to weasel out of it by claiming that it's not on their agenda. Yet the cases seem to keep going forward in Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

For many Muslims today, living in corrupt autocracies, the call for Shariah is not a call for sexism, obscurantism or savage punishment but for an Islamic version of what the West considers its most prized principle of political justice: the rule of law.

Except in the West, the rule of law is subject to the rule of the people. In Islam it's an extension of a tyranny. Even if Islamist parties come to power democratically, they make sure to create a system in which opponents of Islamic law cannot run for election and cannot change the system, the result is as democratic as Fascist or Communist systems of governments. The distinction that legal scholar Noah Feldman keeps dodging the way that Western Communists had to dodge the fraud at the heart of the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat".

But that is of course Feldman's agenda. To argue that there was a glorious past where Sharia ruled more justly than Western law and that any failings of Sharia are modern day failings that can be remedied by creating Democratic Sharia. Better known as socialism with a human face. Or the Islamic boot with a smiley face on the bottom.

The mainstream Sunni Islamist position, found, for example, in the electoral platforms of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, is that an elected legislature should draft and pass laws that are consistent with the spirit of Islamic law... The result is a profound change in the theoretical structure underlying Islamic law: Shariah is democratized in that its care is given to a popularly elected legislature.

Note that Noah Feldman has just described the Muslim Brotherhood as mainstream and whitewashed the fountainhead of global terrorism, that includes Hamas and Al Queda. Truly nothing is as democratic as this wonderful humane Shariah law of the Nazi inspired Muslim Brotherhood, whose ideology was behind the attacks of 9/11.

Can Shariah provide the necessary resources for such a rethinking of the judicial role? In its essence, Shariah aspires to be a law that applies equally to every human, great or small, ruler or ruled. No one is above it, and everyone at all times is bound by it.

Except of course that Dhimmis or non-Muslims are not equal under the law. Nor are women. In fact at the heart of Shariah law is the inequality of non-Muslims. The law applies equally but not everyone is equal under it. This is the sort of clever distinction lawyers thrive on but that readers are meant to miss.

Just as Western Communists hid Stalin's death camps behind glib rhetoric and praise for his humanity, modern day Dhimmis like Noah Feldman hide the reality of Islamic law behind praise calculated to win over liberals always looking to be shown that the seeming evil and brutality of another culture is actually a noble enigma we have yet to grasp.

You can't help but remember Kent Brockman when reading Noah Feldman and his ilk.

"One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."